Can a tea shop in Lafayette transform itself by night into a “cannabis-friendly” co-op and comply with Colorado’s new marijuana amendment?

Not by any normal reading of the measure’s language, it can’t. But apparently lawmakers will have to pass a clarifying statute to drive the point home.

According to the Daily Camera, the Hive Co-op “is BYOC: bring your own cannabis. There’s a 1-ounce limit, $5 cover charge and 21-years-of-age requirement with a valid ID.”

Even local police have given their blessing to the Hive. “They do not appear to be violating any laws,” Lafayette police Cmdr. Gene McCausey told the Daily Camera. The store’s owner, he added, “knows the law very well.”

She does? Amendment 64 never so much as hints at the existence of tea shops — or any other shops or clubs — in which marijuana is smoked and where the only obstacles to entry are an ID and negligible cover charge. Nor is on-premises consumption envisioned in the “licensed retail marijuana store(s)” the amendment does authorize.

What the amendment explicitly bars, meanwhile, is public consumption, with the actual language as follows: “nothing in this section shall permit consumption that is conducted openly and publicly or in a manner that endangers others.”

Does anyone doubt that a nightclub with a cover charge, for example, or a Costco where you must show a membership card is nevertheless a public venue? Of course not. Well, the Hive Co-op, as currently structured, is a public venue in the same sense.

So what does Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett think of this curiosity in Lafayette? “No one has presented this to my office for prosecution so I haven’t done that sort of analysis,” he told me. But he did suggest that an “exclusive club with a membership list” could amount to a gray area in the law.

It might indeed if membership were truly exclusive (in contrast to a universal cover charge). So maybe that’s an issue the governor’s Amendment 64 task force should look into and offer guidance.

Actually, the task force has so many potentially important issues to deal with before its Feb. 28 deadline that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Another one of interest to local communities is whether they should — or even may — regulate retail outlets and growing centers.

The Boulder city manager recently urged the task force to back a “dual licensing process requiring licenses from both the state and local governments, similar to the manner in which retail liquor licenses are regulated … .” It seems that Boulder believes its regulatory framework for medical marijuana would be ideal for recreational marijuana, too.

“If you put the liquor code and Amendment 64 side by side, they’re just not the same,” Kevin Bommer, deputy director of the Colorado Municipal League and a task force member, told me.

In fact, while the amendment grants local governments the ability to regulate the “time, place, manner and number of marijuana establishment operations,” it seems to bar dual licensing or an annual local fee of the sort Boulder imposes on medical marijuana outlets.

Local governments may end up with no more say-so over retail cannabis stores than they have over breweries and wineries, where the state reigns supreme.

Incidentally, one truly jarring idea raised at last week’s task force meeting is for the state itself to run the dispensaries. How anyone could read Amendment 64 and claim with a straight face that it’s compatible with a system of state-owned and operated stores boggles the mind. Next thing you know, some police department is going to tell us that a tea shop can let its customers smoke pot.